Prior to the April 14 airstrikes on Syria, 4chan users launched at least two coordinated disinformation campaigns, overnight on April 11 (here and here), using the strikes as a means to stir up anti-Semitic discourse and make people “suspicious of Jews”.

The user who started one of the campaigns shared a poster that called for “No War in Syria,” and included information to state the campaign was sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In their post, the user said their intention was to “red pill the masses” and they laid out a step-by-step guide for the campaign. They instructed others to share the poster online and print it out, in the hope that “humanitarian millennials start tweeting” in support using the fake #NoWarInSyria poster.

The campaign demonstrates the tactics typically employed by partisan communities online as they seek to sway public opinion

The premise of the plan continued: after the poster caught the attention of the media and the public, the ADL and AIPAC would be forced into “denying sponsorship of this and start condemning it saying that ‘the Jewish community in America supports intervention in Syria.’” This was an expectation that failed to be met, though the campaign is typical of its kind, and used a tactic that has worked in the past.

Others users on the 4chan thread chimed in to offer their opinion, leading the creator of the poster to post updated versions which featured the logos of both organizations more prominently, to “make them more visible” in tweets. Another user said the poster needed “more Jew logos.”

The poster was then shared across multiple social networks, including Gab, Facebook, and Instagram. Soon after it was first shared on 4chan, the poster began appearing on Twitter also, from accounts that regularly espouse pro-Trump, anti-globalist views – see here, here, here – including one user with the Twitter name “Supreme Aryan”.

Reddit users on the_donald forum were called upon to share the poster too, though the version shared on this site included a different iteration of the poster that featured an additional logo for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Neither the ADL, AIPAC, nor the SPLC have launched any Syria-related campaigns on social media in recent days. Nor did they comment on the poster campaign, which ultimately failed in its aim to influence discourse. Despite this failure to catch the attention of mainstream media outlets, or elicit a response from any of the organizations, the campaign demonstrates the tactics typically employed by partisan communities online as they seek to sway public opinion by disseminating false information.